March 16, 1926: Goddard Launches Rocketry

1926: Robert Goddard’s folly becomes fact with the first successful launch of a liquid-fueled rocket, performed at his Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts.1

Goddard has long been considered the father of modern rocketry, but it wasn’t always that way. His ideas of sustainable rocket-powered flight were ridiculed by some colleagues early on, and laughed at in the press.

But he was appreciated abroad, especially in Germany, where the rocket’s potential as a weapon was accepted and eventually realized. Wernher von Braun, who helped develop the V-2 rocket used against England during World War II (and which, ironically, had its first test flight 16 years to the day after the launch at Effie’s farm), described Goddard as an early influence.

Goddard’s great technical achievement was to devise a method that radically increased the fuel efficiency of the rocket engine, to the point where a heavy mass could be propelled upward with minimum fuel expenditure. This, more than any other factor, is what made Goddard’s vision of interplanetary travel feasible.

The press, especially The New York Times had been very hard on Goddard and openly mocked his belief of reaching the moon in a 1920 editorial. But the Times eventually came around. On July 17, 1969, the day after Apollo 11 left for the moon, it got around to running this belated retraction:

“Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”

Source: Various

Video: Excerpt from the “‘Moonwalk Series: Episode 1: The Day Before,” a four-part documentary series made in the 1970’s about the Apollo 11 mission. (Courtesy NASA)

This article first appeared on Wired.com March 16, 2007.

Note 1. The original version of this article misstated the location of Aunt Effie’s farm.